An Escape Room is a fun way to spend an evening where you and a couple of friends are locked in a room. Wait, it sounds weird when I say it like that. The point is to escape from that room, usually in an hour or less, by discovering useful items and solving puzzles, both leading to more items and more puzzles, until you finally unlock the Exit and escape. (Unlock the Exit. See what I did there?) Anyway, it’s a great way to spend an evening with friends, and you do it indoors without getting too sweaty.

Doing things indoor and without getting sweaty brings us to the next step in Escape Room evolution: Why would you even leave your living room? You could have a box full of puzzles to solve at home and avoid all that messy outside business. And that’s were Escape Rooms Inna Box come in, a new kind of cooperative game that lets you have the excitement of an Escape Room around your living room table. You could argue if they are boardgames or not, but we’re not going to nitpick that point right now: They’re produced by the same publishers, made by the same designers and enjoyed by many of the same people as more traditional boardgames. People like us, so we’ll review them when we feel like it.

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Older Reviews

Ten years ago, you thought spanking the monkey was harmless fun. But you spanked him too hard, too long, too violently and the monkey died. Now, on this night, the money is back from the grave, and he’s out for revenge. And none of the above was a euphemism for anything!

In 1804, shortly after president Jefferson purchased half the North American continent from Napoleon, the Lewis and Clark expedition set out to survey just what the president had acquired. Or should that be “the Lewis and Clark expeditions”? As it turns out, up to five expeditions may have competed to get to the Pacific coast first, and only the first to arrive, cleverly recruiting expedition members and managing their resources, will be remembered by history.

Expensive game components, the final frontier for board game publisher. These are the games of Victory Point Games. Their continuing mission: to bring you new games, to seek out new authors, new genres, to boldly ship their games in a ziploc bag.
You guessed it, Final Frontier is a science fiction game that keeps referencing a certain TV series. But is a good theme and paper components in a ziploc game enough to make a great game?

Terra Mystica was the first game by German publisher Feuerland Spiele last year, and to say that it turned out popular is a bit of an understatement. It’s an entirely peaceful fantasy game about colonizing the world, there is no direct conflict, no destroying opposing settlements. But space is very limited and you’ll soon be standing on everyone’s feet. Even more so because the game punishes you for being far away from everyone else. So, did it deserve the rave reviews so far?

Haggis the card game has about as much to do with the Scottish national dish as Tichu the Chinese card game has with China. Haggis the card game does have a whole lot to do with Tichu the card game, but with enough differences to make it an interesting game although you might know Tichu already.

Zavandor, the land of gem mining. After Mines of Zavandor, Gnomes of Zavandor is the second mining-themed set title in the fantasy world. Unlike its predecessor, Gnomes of Zavandor has a strictly economical engineat its core.